Twitter breaks story on Discovery Channel gunman James Lee is the headline in the Washington Post about twitter’s lead in how the mob (crowd, whatever) jumped on a major news story last week. The article has interesting analysis and background, more tweeted stuff, and this summary:

The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.

Have we seen the last printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary? An AP article takes a look:

“At present we are experiencing increasing demand for the online product,” a statement from the publisher said. “However a print version will certainly be considered if there is sufficient demand at the time of publication.”

Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, told The Sunday Times in an interview he didn’t think the newest edition will be printed. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of percent a year,” he said.

Although the comments relate primarily to the full-length dictionary, the publisher says the convenience of the electronic format is also affecting demand for its shorter dictionaries. . . .

Is the probable fate of the venerable OEM a harbinger of what is happening to many other kinds of printed books? My guess is yes.

A scathing article today in The Chronicle of Higher Education proclaims: Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars. The article contains barely a glimmer of hope for what Google books will become after they have been massaged for some months and years by the scholarly mob. The errors in metadata about which the article howls will surely be vetted by users over time as the laws of networks apply the wisdom of the crowd. The pressure of that crowd is already pushing Google to corrective action, as the article mentions.

As the title of Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus, suggests, cleaning up Google’s books would will be a place where the overflow mob of smarts will do some useful work.

UPDATE: Thanks, Edwin, for the heads-up in your comment. You are right about the 2009 date. I did not notice that the article I blogged about was from the “Archives” when I looked at this email from the Chronicle this morning:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#trash/12aa3c278069aeaa

I stand by my opinion about the vetting that will occur. Judy

Copia tells us it is the first social eReading experience designed so you can discover, connect and share what’s meaningful. Michael Wolf at Gigaom.com has a round-up of projects arriving now to turn the trendy eBooks into social experiences. Here are some of Wolf’s thoughts:

. . . I think this is only the beginning as book platforms will integrate more social e-book elements over time. Some potential social features we’ll likely see in e-books include multimedia annotations from your own social network, crowdsourced wikis linked within the book (to provide context and information around book elements), and in-book, location-based information about current and past readers of the books and their social commenting and interaction.

I also predict many will resist the social e-book. Book reading in particular tends to be a solitary exercise, and I can see a passionate resistance to what some will view as an invasion of what I call the social smog to their e-book paradise. Not only that, but chances are, many poor early implementations of social e-books may turn some off to the idea, as seems to have been the case with some early social TV implementations.

That said, there’s no doubt that more people will eventually embrace social reading. The college market will see the most enthusiastic early adoption, as social-media-savvy students look to collaborate, comment and even chat within their books as a way to help them engage more with the text and with their classmates. . . .

H/T Charles Findley

The power of open science within the internet is described by an article in today’s New York Science Times. Although the topic of the article is a possible breakthrough in solving a mathematical problem, what is revealed about the future of science is a much bigger idea. Here is the flavor:

In this case, however, the significant breakthrough may not be in the science, but rather in the way science is practiced. By the middle of last week, although Dr. Deolalikar had not backed away from his claim, a consensus had emerged among complexity theorists that the proposed proof had several significant shortcomings.

“At this point the consensus is that there are large holes in the alleged proof — in fact, large enough that people do not consider the alleged proof to be a proof,” Dr. Vardi said. “I think Deolalikar got his 15 minutes of fame, but at this point the excitement has subsided and the skepticism is turning into negative conviction.”

What was highly significant, however, was the pace of discussion and analysis, carried out in real time on blogs and a wiki that had been quickly set up for the purpose of collectively analyzing the paper. This kind of collaboration has emerged only in recent years in the math and computer science communities. In the past, intense discussions like the one that surrounded the proof of the Poincaré conjecture were carried about via private e-mail and distribution lists as well as in the pages of traditional paper-based science journals. . . .

MoMA App, available at the App Store, puts a panoply of information about New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in your hand. If you have ever visited this very popular museum in the heart of Manhattan, you will know that dealing with its mobs of visitors is a challenge. MoMA App gives you help in advance for planning your visit to the museum and when you get there, provides information about where things are and the art you are viewing as you go through the galleries. MoMA’s website provides a video description of the MoMA App.

“Long queues of voters waiting peacefully.” “Needy voters assisted.” “mp agents going round poll stations influencing people 2 vote no.” These are some of the 1,230 tweets and text messages sent out by citizen monitors of Kenya’s referendum last week. The platform enabling this crowdsourcing of on-the-ground election reports is called Uchaguzi, which means “election” in Kiswahili. Uchaguzi is a spinoff of an earlier platform called Ushahidi, meaning “testimony,” which was developed during the violence after Kenya’s 2007 presidential election, and has since been used to map damage from the BP oil spill, earthquake victims in Haiti, and xenophobic violence in South Africa (and has been blogged about many times on right here on Smart Mobs). Both platforms follow the same model: set up a special SMS shortcode, Twitter hashtag (#uchaguzi for Kenya’s referendum), or e-mail address, publicize it, and solicit reports from ordinary people. And voilà: Kenyan citizens self-organize a robust citizen reporting system, a classic case of smart mobbiness, in a country with seemingly more camels than cellphones. “‘It’s something very new for Kenyans to know that they can instantly report an incident to an independent monitor far away who will guarantee to investigate,’ says Charles Kithika, a website fix-it guy at Uchaguzi. ‘It will discourage the bad people from doing things they used to think they could get away with.’” And in fact, although 166 “Security Issues” were reported, there were none of actual violence. Plans to bring similar platforms to other East African countries with impending elections are in the works. Click here to read the original article.

You can add your wisdom to the mob of folders at Foldit, attracted by University of Wisconsin protein researchers. The story of the project is reported in today’s Science Times:

. . . The success of the Foldit players, the researchers report in the current issue of Nature, shows that nonscientists can collaborate to develop new strategies and algorithms that are distinct from traditional software solutions to the challenge of protein folding.

The researchers took pains to credit the volunteers who competed at Foldit in the last two years, listing “Foldit players” at the end of the report’s author list and noting that more than 57,000 players “contributed extensively through their feedback and gameplay.” . . .

Social media expert Gaurav Mishra elaborates in this post on the Guardian Activate 2010 talk he held on two paradigms of digital activism.

Smart mob readers may also want to check out other posts of Gaurav Mishra :

- My Guardian Activate Summit Speaker Interview on Digital Activism
- Two Paradigms of Digital Activism: Empowering With Information Versus Engaging With Inspiration
- Three Lessons Activists and Marketers Can Learn From India’s Valentine’s Day Pink Panty Campaign
- 8 Tips To Extend Your Online Community Offline
- Irish Times Story on Iran’s Twitter (Non-)Revolution
- My Empodera/ e-STAS Book Chapter — A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework